This is an excellent piece, many thanks. It cuts to the heart of our
current debate. Reading it, one might also feel shocked at the rarity of
critical reflection on the technological and organizational conditions
of knowledge production in the universities. Here at last someone puts a
finger on academic alienation from the means of production and
distribution. And the point of the reflection is to act, to change the
hyper-competitive for-profit system of publication that effectuates a
privatization of knowledge.

Of course, no feeling of shock will affect recent generations of
"precarious intellectuals" who cannot find - or in some cases, don't
want to find - secure positions within the context of academic
overproduction described by Ted Striphas. The crucial generational
difference is that from the Sixties to the Eighties, universities
expanded vastly, integrating scholars who had gone through a period of
deep social contestation. When they set about defining their
professional goals and reshaping their fields, these scholars believed
they were changing one of the central mechanisms of social reproduction
in the knowledge societies: the university itself. They were changing it
by the _content_ they brought, the theoretical techniques, the teaching
styles, the new disciplines or transdisciplines and the intense
questioning of both the "objects" and "subjects" of academic study --
all of which helped open the universities to new practices and different
people, in terms of class, race, culture, sexuality and so on. A lot was
accomplished in this way and one should not forget it.

From today's precarious perspective, however, the Sixties-to-Eighties
generation lost the battle on two fronts. First and most obviously, the
culture wars in the US, and more recently, the attacks on multicultural
policy in Europe, have led to a weakening of the most socially
transformative programs. At the same time, the new entrepreneurial
management, with its ethics and metrics of hypercompetition, have voided
much of the substance from the philosophical positions of the
radicalized generation, whose most distinguished and sexy members were
sucked into a worldwide star system. Vast new sets of issues brought on
by networked globalization have not been subject to active political
dissent, but only turned into grist for the mill of normative and
neutralized career-paths. In the last decade the two trends came
together in the form of direct persecution of individuals, broader
"chilling effects" on critical research, increased workloads and
performance metrics, and above all, budget cuts and shrinking
departments, with the consequence of a dramatically increasing
casualization of the university labor force. Would-be academics suddenly
discovered that they have no career perspectives, and that because of
the kinds of specialization they've been forced into by
hyper-competition, their writings as well as their protests have no
audience. The content has not circulated in the right way, which is the
overarching point that Ted Striphas makes.

Instead of sustaining an alternative culture that can resist the
dominant one, critical research has been funneled into the new
hierarchies created by entrepreneurial administrators and by
corporations such as Elsevier and Informaworld. The mix of egalitarian
and environmental concerns that define all the different versions of the
"New Left" seem to have gotten lost along the way. In fact, the
universities no longer produce anything as politically potent as the
aspirations of the Sixties-to-Eighties generation of radicals -- not
even in the writing and the actions of nost of those same "radicals."
The wave of student protests and university occupations that has swept
across the world in the last three years (often under the impulse of
working grad students and adjunct professors) has finally translated the
precarious perspective into words and acts, which is a damn good thing
in my opinion. We are still waiting to hear the echoes in the academic
presses.

The only way for people in the social sciences and the humanities to
regain some progressive societal influence would be to reasses what one
of the founding Cultural Studies books called "the uses of literacy" --
but this time I mean, the uses of their own literacy, by themselves,
their employers, their students and the wider literate culture with
which they often fail to connect. What are the uses of literacy in the
contemporary knowledge societies? In what kinds of technological and
organizational infrastructure are these uses grounded? What subjective,
cultural, social and political forms result from the networked uses of
academic literacy? What kinds of blind spots are produced? And how can
those involved exert a reflexive effect on these dynamics?

Gary, your post and the Striphas article have led me to a fascinating
work, namely your own "Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, Or
Why We Need Open Access Now." This pdf reads like an expanded, in-depth
synthesis of all the excellent debates we've had on this topic on
nettime over many years, since the Budapest Open Access Initiative was
launched in 2002. As I understand it, the book is not a hacker call to
piracy, but instead a program to achieve institutional transformation,
using the technical possibility of free access as a wedge to open up the
current university hierarchy and fight the entrepreneurial trend with a
new constructive program. It seems the book was supposed to be available
in the digitized form championed by its title. And it is -- but as far
as I can tell (perhaps due to some technical glitch?), it's only
available at the website-of-choice for today's precarious generation:
everybody's library-of-the-future-right-now, aaaaarg.org. A recommended
destination for the alienated academic multitudes.